Drawing career back on track: R.I. ex-toy designer creates artwork for car enthusiasts

Saturday

Nov 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM

NORTH KINGSTOWN — Guy Cassaday’s career has taken a number of turns but has always returned to drawing cars. He started by getting into trouble at elementary school for doodling. After many years designing toys,...

By Peter C.T. Elsworth

NORTH KINGSTOWN — Guy Cassaday’s career has taken a number of turns but has always returned to drawing cars.

He started by getting into trouble at elementary school for doodling. After many years designing toys, including the iconic Tonka Mighty Dump Truck in the early 1980s, and a detour into selling Porsches, he is now drawing classics in a variety of mediums and selling both prints and original works, including commissions, plus images of pedal cars in a classic auto style on colored fine art paper.

The signature piece for his current career is a red and white 1957 Buick Caballero hard top (no center pillar) station wagon that he uses to advertise his business, artforautoenthusiasts.com. “It’s something distinctive,” Cassaday said. Other images include a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, a 1940 Ford Woody, a 1962 Metropolitan and a very rare 1935 Rosengart.

The originals are rendered in chalk, marker and gouache and he prints copies from the computer in his studio, which is distinguished by a vast drafting table and mementos of his life in toy design.

Strewn across the table were images he is working on — pedal cars drawn in marker and chalk on colored paper from Canson, a famed French paper company, and highlighted with streaks of white gouache. “It’s an old style” of drawing cars for the auto industry, he said, noting that the color of the vehicle determines the choice of paper.

“It’s not done anymore,” he said of the old but instantly identifiable style. “Red car on red paper, blue car on blue paper, yellow car on yellow paper.”

A row of Tonka Mighty Dump Trucks — including the gold 1997 50th anniversary model — and other Tonka vehicles runs along the top of one wall of his studio. Photos and posters of AMC cars and Chrysler Imperials adorn the walls; one promotes a show of the work of the late Bernyce Polifka , one of his professors at the famed Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.

The model of an AMC AMX in Big Bad Green with white stripes catches the eye — he said his own AMX was painted the same color — along with a number of G.I. Joe vehicles, and even a particular G.I. Joe modeled on his own features.

“I always liked cars and always liked drawing,” he said, noting the limo at his wedding was a 1950 DeSoto. He and his wife, Maria, have a son who is a senior in high school.

Cassaday, 57, said he often got into trouble for drawing during classes at elementary school on the New Jersey Shore where he grew up. At the same time, he said, his talent was recognized and he started taking oil painting classes at a local college while in high school and still has a number of seascapes from that time. “We lived a mile from the beach,” he said, adding he also got involved in graphic design with the school newspaper.

He also developed an interest in auto design along with an affection for AMC cars, including his own AMC AMX, and wrote to Richard Teague, who was then head of design at the former American Motors Corp. He said Teague, whom he met many years later, advised him to apply to the Pratt Institute in New York and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, which is famed for its auto design program.

“It was a cold letter,” he said, noting that he had no connection to Teague. “[But] I always liked AMC cars … their underdog tenacity.”

He majored in industrial design-transportation at Pasadena, graduating in 1979, but “the economy tanked and there were no jobs in Detroit,” he said. So, he got a job at Tonka in Minnesota and was involved in redesigning its signature Mighty Dump Truck to cut the weight and reduce production costs.

He later designed toys — notably My Little Pony accessories and G.I. Joe models — for various Hasbro companies including Playskool and Milton Bradley, and even returned to Tonka, which Hasbro had purchased in 1991.

He left corporate work in 1997 to freelance as a toy designer for such companies as Fisher-Price and Mattel (which acquired Fisher-Price in 1993), as well as Hasbro and Seekonk-based Little Kids. The Great Recession forced him back into corporate life, this time taking a break from design to try his hand at selling Porsches at Inskip’s Warwick Automall for more than two years.

“Porsche is an incredible company, a fabulous company to work for,” he said, but added that he missed his vocation as an artist and designer and decided to get back into the saddle at his drafting table at the beginning of the year.

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